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I'll ignore the unnecessary personal attack in the first half. You were the one that accused me of being too invested in bitcoin to change my mind, and I retali

by npoc 3y ago

I'll ignore the unnecessary personal attack in the first half. You were the one that accused me of being too invested in bitcoin to change my mind, and I retaliated by pointing out the reverse can be equally said. I'm certainly not using it as some sales technique or reason to invest. I can see why Satoshi Nakamoto famously said "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.". This is quite tiring and we aren't getting very far very fast. Please don't turn this into another lengthy character slur and let's focus on bitcoin itself. Yes I agree that technically the miners do vote on what bitcoin is, but they have no more power than the light-weight validation nodes. Ultimately, its the people that decide what bitcoin is, not the miners. So onto the energy expenditure: I completely agree that the energy expenditure is used to secure the network and the transactions within blockchain. I also completely agree that most people would see the energy expenditure as a waste. On the face of it, it's massive amounts of energy that's just flushed down the toilet in the name of doing some maths problems, almost all of which are discarded. It's absolutely true. I get it, okay! How can it not be a waste? It only took a 2 minute conversation back in 2012 for me to write off bitcoin as a waste of energy for 8 years on this very basis! The fact is that you have to zoom right out and see a much bigger view to understand why it's not a waste of energy and is actually the opposite. This is where the problem bitcoin is trying to solve comes in. And once you see the whole picture, it becomes clear that bitcoin has solved the problem in the most efficient way possible. In fact it's a work of art. It's beautiful. So we've dealt with the technology side of things to the point where we have enough agreement to discuss the bigger picture. There's a couple of maxims to lay out first: The first maxim is that if we double the amount of currency units, each unit will gradually have half the value compared to if we hadn't. The second is if it's possible for humans to create money without exerting work of equal value, then they will take advantage and inevitably create more and more money. This has been demonstrated throughout history and is currently repeating once again with the fiat currencies around the world. We can't trust - we have to verify. Combining those two maxims shows us that if we give certain humans the ability to print money with less effort than the money is worth, then they are essentially incentivised to do this as much as they can get away with. They get to create and spend the money at the current value while it slowly goes down in value as the rest of the population spend it. At the extreme, where they can create the money for free (e.g. centralised digital/paper money) then they essentially have a faucet of free money, the value of which is sucked out of the money owned by the rest of the people. Along with it's other fundamental properties (divisibility, portability, fungibility etc), the reason why gold stood the test of time as a good store-of-value was because there is no way that you can mine gold without exerting at least as much energy as the gold is worth. If the demand for gold goes up, the price rises, more gold miners are incentivised to mine and the increased supply brings down the price again. In reality this has stabilised at an average supply inflation of 1.5% - the amount of above-ground gold doubles every 50 years. Even though this natural tying of value to mining effort has maintained the scarcity of gold for thousands of years (about as well as it can be done in the physical world), the other monetary properties of gold were not a patch on the later paper money that represented gold and so bank paper took over the role of money in society. However, in accordance with second maxim I gave, it wasn't long before bankers figured out a way to print more and more paper currency without people realising and ultimately we now have digital fiat currencies that they can "print" almost freely with no limit. This leads to a massive wealth transfer due to the Cantillon effect, which ultimately can be seen in the currency unit leaking value right out of your hands. You can put your money in a concrete vault buried 10 miles under ground and still the bankers can steal the value out of it by simply turning on the money printer. So in order to fix this, and obtain a better money, more like gold but with the digital qualities of fiat, standing on the shoulders of giants, Nakamoto solved the long-standing computer science problem for decentralised digital currencies - the double spend problem. Essentially bitcoin solves the problem of a digital asset with scarcity. And history shows that the only way it can do this is to require that the creation of the units of the asset demands the same amount of work as the unit's value. We can't simply trust humans not to create more, cheaply (or as you might put it, efficiently). Money is energy. And it's perfectly natural to require the same amount of energy to create it. If it doesn't then the value in the existing money is essentially stolen by the people creating the money cheaply, to make up the difference. You simply can't break the laws of nature in this way. Money is energy, and you can't create energy out of thin air, you can only convert it from one form to another. I know it's not physical energy. It's a more abstract form of potential energy. The proof of work required by bitcoin is an abstraction of work. It could equally demand proof that miners have dug a hole and then filled it in again, before being rewarded with newly minted bitcoin of equal value. It turns out that getting them to find the nonce to generate a hash within a range is a form of work impossible to fake, and is in a digital form native to the network. If we try to make the work they do useful in some other way, they can monetize it and are then essentially getting the freshly minted bitcoin for less than the net energy they exerted (their energy cost is offset by the monetized returns of their "useful" work). Understanding and seeing money as energy (or more accurately, a container for energy) along with the then obvious constraints on creation in this way is crucial to understanding why any sound digital money requires equivalent work for its issuance, and any alternative will simply lead to a weak money that goes to zero in time. You can't break the rules of nature. Bitcoin doesn't need to be a currency - all it needs to be is a liquid asset, with hard scarcity, accessible by anyone in the world, and it will succeed. Success to some simply means it will go up in value enormously and make them fabulously wealthy and free. To last adopters it means they can store their wealth without it being stolen, or having to gamble it on the stock market , or buying extra housing enslaving yet another person stuck in the rental trap. To others it means that it provides an escape hatch from the enormous wealth transfer system that's central banking, ultimately shutting down the central banking scam, and fixing so many of the problems we see in the world caused by it (wars, third-world poverty, government corruption - the list gets longer the longer you look) The fact is that first it needs to prove itself as a store of value. As it does this more and more people will store their value in it. Once it has saturated its market and the value as stabilised, it will be suitable for unit of account and certainly medium of exchange on an inter-bank, inter-nation scale. Once enough people have enough of it and once it's stable enough to be used as unit of account, only then will we need to worry about it being capable of medium of exchange to buy your coffee with. If all else fails, it will run on centralised payment rails like Paypal. In the meantime, the current banking system/government/media machine will do everything it can to kill it, as it takes away their power. Somehow magically, it turns out that it seems there's nothing they can do to stop it. All they can do is eventually accept it and join it. But that's probably something for another day.

danShumway 3y ago
> I'll ignore the unnecessary personal attack in the first half To be clear, extremely necessary and no apology extended, I'm willing to be abstract about a lot of this but I am not willing to pretend that FOMO isn't FOMO and I am not willing to gloss over an extremely prevalent attitude within the Bitcoin community about disregarding risks, an attitude that has very directly harmed people in the past. You can choose to view that as a personal attack or not, the reality is that the marketing behind Bitcoin is extremely reminiscent of MLM schemes and uses much of the same logic. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because it makes proponents uncomfortable. On other topics I'm willing to be abstract and nice, but if you make gross arguments that have historically been used to hurt people I am going to call the arguments out. Doesn't mean you're bad, but the arguments are bad. Heavy financial investment into systems does decrease objectivity. ---- > I can see why Satoshi Nakamoto famously said "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry." Weirdly enough, my experience is that Bitcoin proponents as a whole seem to have an abundant amount of time to try and convince people of the coin's value and seem to expend an enormous amount of effort doing so at every opportunity. ---- > Yes I agree that technically the miners do vote on what bitcoin is, but they have no more power than the light-weight validation nodes. Ultimately, its the people that decide what bitcoin is, not the miners. Debatable, but once again this has really nothing to do with the energy use, I'm not making an argument here about the governmental structures of Bitcoin or about how forks are handled. ---- > This is where the problem bitcoin is trying to solve comes in. And once you see the whole picture, it becomes clear that bitcoin has solved the problem in the most efficient way possible. Proof of work is not the only system for enforcing digital scarcity. Proof of stake is not even the only other system. Multiple other coins have built other consensus mechanisms around other forms of work and/or stake that are pretty arguably better than Bitcoin's energy-specific version. I take issue with the claim that Bitcoin would be efficient even if Bitcoin was actually solving the problems it claimed to solve. "Proof of" systems do not inherently require that the planet be destroyed; Bitcoin's implementation does. That scarcity could be enforced more efficiently by using a different proof system that didn't specifically rely on spending energy. ---- > if we double the amount of currency units, each unit will gradually have half the value compared to if we hadn't. This is more complicated than you're making it sound, currency value is partially related to direct spending power. You're not halving value just by printing money, that money has to actually make it into the market and increase the overall supply. The way that money is introduced into the market also matters; there are ways to introduce money into a market specifically through the sponsorship of new economic activity and real-world development that increases the overall real-world value that the total money supply represents. But otherwise yes, you are correct that inflation exists. > This has been demonstrated throughout history and is currently repeating once again with the fiat currencies around the world. We can't trust - we have to verify. More on this in a second, but you're making an unproven leap here towards the notion that inflationary currencies are inherently a bad outcome. That's not really backed up by history, what we find in practice is that inflationary currencies broadly are better for everyday transactions than deflationary currencies because inflation incentivizes spending and economic activity. Yes, Bitcoin was founded on the theory that deflationary currencies could work, and it was an interesting theory, I remember at the time thinking they might be right. But they weren't, the deflationary nature of Bitcoin severely limited its use as a currency and continues to do so today. > Along with it's other fundamental properties (divisibility, portability, fungibility etc), the reason why gold stood the test of time as a good store-of-value was because there is no way that you can mine gold without exerting at least as much energy as the gold is worth. This is a pretty huge oversimplification of how gold worked and how regulated it was (and is). It also paints an overly rosy picture of the effects of gold and why it was ultimately abandoned as a currency standard. Gold didn't prevent massive wealth transfers to the elite, it was not a democratizing currency. > and ultimately we now have digital fiat currencies that they can "print" almost freely with no limit. Once again, this is a pretty big oversimplification of how currency enters the market. Also you can't just print money with no limit, not unless you want the dollars you just printed to be worthless when the economy crashes. Again, we've got historical examples of this, countries that try to transfer wealth or solve economic problems by mass-printing money without constraint or economic theory end up with useless currencies even for the grifters. In contrast, while USD monetary policy is admittedly not fantastic, it is a far cry from totally unconstrained printing. ---- > This leads to a massive wealth transfer due to the Cantillon effect Deflationary currencies also have their own version of this problem, because deflationary currency inherently incentives hoarding and inherently tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of early adapters, which can in the extremes lead to deflationary spirals that also result in economic crashes and worthless currency. In less extreme situations you get Bitcoin, where the majority of the coin's worth today is concentrated in the hands a small number of actors. While the Cantillon Effect is a real phenomenon with real world implications, it does not imply that deflationary currencies are necessarily immune from those problems or that inflation is not still a necessary component of incentivizing actual wealth transfer and spending within an economic system. In short, there is not strong evidence that deflationary currencies are a better way to build an economic system; resources like gold largely weren't deflationary during their heyday and were regularly augmented with new supply which exhibited the same effect you complain about (note that the "work" of mining does not inherently remove the Cantillon Effect, new supply is still being introduced and centralized into the hands of the biggest stakeholders, even if they had to work to get it). The history of how Bitcoin has played out and the concentration of wealth within the Bitcoin ecosystem and lack of incentive to actually invest Bitcoin into real economic activity rather than hoarding it -- that is all decently strong evidence that deflationary currencies are just kind of not a great idea in general for everyday economics. ----- > Money is energy. No it's not, it's an abstract representation of value based on social consensus. Bitcoin included. Money is not energy. > Understanding and seeing money as energy (or more accurately, a container for energy) No, this is exactly what I was getting at in my previous comment about why understanding proof of work matters. The work being expended during mining is not for creating new coins. In fact, Bitcoin has a hard cap of new coins and at some point they're going to run out. That energy is not being stored in the network. It is a security measure. The creation of new coins is a temporary incentive designed to encourage mining by transferring a portion of the network's value to miners as part of every transaction. It is not the primary purpose of mining, mining exists to validate transactions. If the price of Bitcoin never rose again from this point, the same amount energy would still need to be spent to secure the network every day. That energy is not going into a container, it is being lost. Furthermore, as the price of Bitcoin rises, the energy requirements to secure the network also rise. It is more accurate to think of Bitcoin as an expenditure of energy rather than as a container for energy. The "Bitcoin as a battery" notion that has become popular in this space is complete fiction, there is zero grounding in reality to back up that idea. Nothing about the coin indicates that the work being expended to secure it is somehow being "stored" somewhere, and even Bitcoin proponents would see that the idea is absurd if applied to other systems. You don't say that the USD is a battery that stores regulatory and military expenditure, do you? You understand that securing a system is not the same thing as using it as a battery. ---- The rest of this post is a breathless advertisement for investing into crypto, which doesn't really need discussion other than to point out that the majority of things you're talking about haven't happened; Bitcoin has not lead to a democratization of wealth, the coin has unusually high levels of wealth concentration. It is highly manipulable and evidence suggests its value tracks with the stock market, it is not a secure store of value because of its extreme volatility, and that has demonstrably led to a large number of people losing huge amounts of money that would not have been lost if they had invested in traditional markets or in gold. The coin has not stabilized and shows no sign of stabilizing, and has done basically nothing to reduce corruption, war, or international conflict. But by all means, if that stuff does happen, that will be a great outcome and I'll be very happy. But I'm not going to blindly believe in it.

by npoc 3y ago

danShumway 3y ago

> I'll ignore the unnecessary personal attack in the first half To be clear, extremely necessary and no apology extended, I'm willing to be abstract about a lot of this but I am not willing to pretend that FOMO isn't FOMO and I am not willing to gloss over an extremely prevalent attitude within the Bitcoin community about disregarding risks, an attitude that has very directly harmed people in the past. You can choose to view that as a personal attack or not, the reality is that the marketing behind Bitcoin is extremely reminiscent of MLM schemes and uses much of the same logic. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because it makes proponents uncomfortable. On other topics I'm willing to be abstract and nice, but if you make gross arguments that have historically been used to hurt people I am going to call the arguments out. Doesn't mean you're bad, but the arguments are bad. Heavy financial investment into systems does decrease objectivity. ---- > I can see why Satoshi Nakamoto famously said "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry." Weirdly enough, my experience is that Bitcoin proponents as a whole seem to have an abundant amount of time to try and convince people of the coin's value and seem to expend an enormous amount of effort doing so at every opportunity. ---- > Yes I agree that technically the miners do vote on what bitcoin is, but they have no more power than the light-weight validation nodes. Ultimately, its the people that decide what bitcoin is, not the miners. Debatable, but once again this has really nothing to do with the energy use, I'm not making an argument here about the governmental structures of Bitcoin or about how forks are handled. ---- > This is where the problem bitcoin is trying to solve comes in. And once you see the whole picture, it becomes clear that bitcoin has solved the problem in the most efficient way possible. Proof of work is not the only system for enforcing digital scarcity. Proof of stake is not even the only other system. Multiple other coins have built other consensus mechanisms around other forms of work and/or stake that are pretty arguably better than Bitcoin's energy-specific version. I take issue with the claim that Bitcoin would be efficient even if Bitcoin was actually solving the problems it claimed to solve. "Proof of" systems do not inherently require that the planet be destroyed; Bitcoin's implementation does. That scarcity could be enforced more efficiently by using a different proof system that didn't specifically rely on spending energy. ---- > if we double the amount of currency units, each unit will gradually have half the value compared to if we hadn't. This is more complicated than you're making it sound, currency value is partially related to direct spending power. You're not halving value just by printing money, that money has to actually make it into the market and increase the overall supply. The way that money is introduced into the market also matters; there are ways to introduce money into a market specifically through the sponsorship of new economic activity and real-world development that increases the overall real-world value that the total money supply represents. But otherwise yes, you are correct that inflation exists. > This has been demonstrated throughout history and is currently repeating once again with the fiat currencies around the world. We can't trust - we have to verify. More on this in a second, but you're making an unproven leap here towards the notion that inflationary currencies are inherently a bad outcome. That's not really backed up by history, what we find in practice is that inflationary currencies broadly are better for everyday transactions than deflationary currencies because inflation incentivizes spending and economic activity. Yes, Bitcoin was founded on the theory that deflationary currencies could work, and it was an interesting theory, I remember at the time thinking they might be right. But they weren't, the deflationary nature of Bitcoin severely limited its use as a currency and continues to do so today. > Along with it's other fundamental properties (divisibility, portability, fungibility etc), the reason why gold stood the test of time as a good store-of-value was because there is no way that you can mine gold without exerting at least as much energy as the gold is worth. This is a pretty huge oversimplification of how gold worked and how regulated it was (and is). It also paints an overly rosy picture of the effects of gold and why it was ultimately abandoned as a currency standard. Gold didn't prevent massive wealth transfers to the elite, it was not a democratizing currency. > and ultimately we now have digital fiat currencies that they can "print" almost freely with no limit. Once again, this is a pretty big oversimplification of how currency enters the market. Also you can't just print money with no limit, not unless you want the dollars you just printed to be worthless when the economy crashes. Again, we've got historical examples of this, countries that try to transfer wealth or solve economic problems by mass-printing money without constraint or economic theory end up with useless currencies even for the grifters. In contrast, while USD monetary policy is admittedly not fantastic, it is a far cry from totally unconstrained printing. ---- > This leads to a massive wealth transfer due to the Cantillon effect Deflationary currencies also have their own version of this problem, because deflationary currency inherently incentives hoarding and inherently tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of early adapters, which can in the extremes lead to deflationary spirals that also result in economic crashes and worthless currency. In less extreme situations you get Bitcoin, where the majority of the coin's worth today is concentrated in the hands a small number of actors. While the Cantillon Effect is a real phenomenon with real world implications, it does not imply that deflationary currencies are necessarily immune from those problems or that inflation is not still a necessary component of incentivizing actual wealth transfer and spending within an economic system. In short, there is not strong evidence that deflationary currencies are a better way to build an economic system; resources like gold largely weren't deflationary during their heyday and were regularly augmented with new supply which exhibited the same effect you complain about (note that the "work" of mining does not inherently remove the Cantillon Effect, new supply is still being introduced and centralized into the hands of the biggest stakeholders, even if they had to work to get it). The history of how Bitcoin has played out and the concentration of wealth within the Bitcoin ecosystem and lack of incentive to actually invest Bitcoin into real economic activity rather than hoarding it -- that is all decently strong evidence that deflationary currencies are just kind of not a great idea in general for everyday economics. ----- > Money is energy. No it's not, it's an abstract representation of value based on social consensus. Bitcoin included. Money is not energy. > Understanding and seeing money as energy (or more accurately, a container for energy) No, this is exactly what I was getting at in my previous comment about why understanding proof of work matters. The work being expended during mining is not for creating new coins. In fact, Bitcoin has a hard cap of new coins and at some point they're going to run out. That energy is not being stored in the network. It is a security measure. The creation of new coins is a temporary incentive designed to encourage mining by transferring a portion of the network's value to miners as part of every transaction. It is not the primary purpose of mining, mining exists to validate transactions. If the price of Bitcoin never rose again from this point, the same amount energy would still need to be spent to secure the network every day. That energy is not going into a container, it is being lost. Furthermore, as the price of Bitcoin rises, the energy requirements to secure the network also rise. It is more accurate to think of Bitcoin as an expenditure of energy rather than as a container for energy. The "Bitcoin as a battery" notion that has become popular in this space is complete fiction, there is zero grounding in reality to back up that idea. Nothing about the coin indicates that the work being expended to secure it is somehow being "stored" somewhere, and even Bitcoin proponents would see that the idea is absurd if applied to other systems. You don't say that the USD is a battery that stores regulatory and military expenditure, do you? You understand that securing a system is not the same thing as using it as a battery. ---- The rest of this post is a breathless advertisement for investing into crypto, which doesn't really need discussion other than to point out that the majority of things you're talking about haven't happened; Bitcoin has not lead to a democratization of wealth, the coin has unusually high levels of wealth concentration. It is highly manipulable and evidence suggests its value tracks with the stock market, it is not a secure store of value because of its extreme volatility, and that has demonstrably led to a large number of people losing huge amounts of money that would not have been lost if they had invested in traditional markets or in gold. The coin has not stabilized and shows no sign of stabilizing, and has done basically nothing to reduce corruption, war, or international conflict. But by all means, if that stuff does happen, that will be a great outcome and I'll be very happy. But I'm not going to blindly believe in it.